My Rakuten Experience: Rew
Rew is an Application Engineer at the Leisure Product Department
Current Role
The Leisure Product Department collaborates strongly with those involved in the company’s businesses to provide a variety of services. The service I’m primarily in charge of, Rakuten Keiba (Horse Racing), is a site that allows members to bet online and manage/view activities. I work as a full-stack engineer, performing service development and maintenance to ensure that our products and services can be provided in a seamless manner. Having so many people use our service and being able to create new systems to enhance user-friendly environments really motivate me.
Current Environment
Rakuten Crimson House’s location in Futakotamagawa is excellent. It’s situated exactly between Tokyo and Kanagawa, which means that the place doesn’t get overly busy. The air here is relatively clean and the view from my office window is amazing. On clear days you can even see Mt. Fuji. The strong bond with my colleagues also helps motivate me to perform to the best of my abilities. Wonderful colleagues, who are my close friends and amazing developers, and the managers, who really understand their subordinates, are the biggest factors that enhance my constant motivation at work.
Skill Improvements
About half of the members in my department are not from Japan. Working with colleagues with diverse cultural backgrounds and various English proficiency levels has helped improve my ability to clearly state my thoughts and explain technical details, as well as my communication skills. In addition, it is useful that at the weekly engineer meetings we can share things we’ve recently learned and ways through which we’ve resolved issues occurring at work. When we have time, we work on ways to streamline our workflows, or create simple tools and utilities to improve the development environment.
Careers at Rakuten
At the moment, I want to continue to improve my capabilities as a full-stack engineer and keep considering what I want to do in the future. In other words, I will consider the kinds of skills I need to improve as well as how I can use these effectively, while keeping Rakuten’s and my goals in mind. I’ve met some absolutely amazing people through my career, and I find quite a lot of these people at Rakuten. I aim to be more like them, be able to cope with a variety of tasks and support a variety of teams and individuals. I plan to improve my abilities and become a team member with even more wide-ranging skills.
How many projects are you currently in charge of?
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*The affiliation and contents of the article are based on the contents at the time of the interview.
